The question about Protestantism and science is really a very simple
one. The Roman Catholic hierarchy had one official view of reality.
The Protestants got their name as "protesting" this view.
Beyond that, Protestantism is a completely mixed bag. Some of them
wanted to replace the singular Catholic view with another, competing
singular view. Others didn't care about secular matters were entirely
focused on who gets to dunk who in the holy water at which age....
There were hypercapitalist views who basically equated wealthiness
with godliness. And there were Christian communists raging about the
merchants. Many times the latter focused their ire on the Jews.
In Bohemia, the Adamites (I think that was what they called
themselves) decided that Jesus wanted them to be nudists.
Funny thing that Protestant Revolution.
The one thing it did mean is that, ultimately, survival, prosperity,
and stability would require mutual tolerance (except for the more
extreme versions of Protestants and they didn't want much to do with
the rest of the sinful world anyway).
In the end, then Protestantism was about the overthrow of Catholic
hegemony over matters ranging from theology through science to
culture. It opened the door to many possibilities...some of them
promising and others not all of them particularly good or positive.
So, the bottom line is that we have to be careful about talking about
Protestantism as though it were some coherent alternative to
Catholicism.
ML